Beijing, April 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Since the release of Qunar’s Q4 2014 financial report, as of 12:00 PM Beijing time on April 7, its stock price has risen by over 57%, bringing the company’s total market value to more than $5 billion.
Qunar’s market value exceeds $5 billion
In the internet industry, a $5 billion market cap is a significant milestone. Currently, with a market value of 52 billion yuan, Qunar ranks 14th among Chinese internet companies and 9th among Chinese companies listed overseas.
Looking at the market cap growth trajectories of Tencent and Baidu, we can see that after going public in Hong Kong in May 2004, it took Tencent 30 months to surpass a $5 billion market cap; Baidu, which went public in the U.S. in August 2005, achieved this milestone in just 15 months. Over the following nine years, Tencent and Baidu entered a fast lane of market cap growth—Tencent’s market cap multiplied 36 times to reach $180 billion, while Baidu’s grew 14 times to $71.2 billion. Qunar, on the other hand, reached a $5 billion market cap in just 16 months.
Judging solely from the trajectory of market cap growth, Qunar’s rapid breach of the $5 billion mark is an impressive start.Ctrip, another leading player in China’s online travel services industry, took six years to grow its market cap to $5 billion. Today, its market value stands at $8.2 billion, representing a growth of only 1.64 times. In 2011, Ctrip’s market cap was 10 times that of Qunar; today, it is only 1.6 times. The gap between the two is gradually narrowing.
Zhu Zhengyu, an analyst at Analysys, believes that the tourism industry has transformed into a growth industry, with the online travel penetration rate expected to accelerate and market concentration continuing to increase. Large enterprises with capital, technology, and resources will capture an increasingly larger share of the market. Online travel stocks, represented by Qunar, are viewed favorably, thanks to the government’s emphasis on integrating the internet into traditional industries and the companies’ better-than-expected revenue growth.
Now, Qunar has entered the fast lane that Tencent and Baidu were on back then. Whether it can approach today’s BAT giants in a few years remains to be seen.